—Dora and Daniela, thank you for these poems. They’re a wonderful teaser trailer of your full-length translation of Xitlalitl Rodríguez Mendoza’s JAWS, forthcoming from Cardboard House Press in 2026! How did you first encounter Mendoza’s work, and what about this particular collection spoke to you as translators?

We both love a good film, we love the ocean and its creatures, and we saw ourselves in the text in ways that are mysterious and political.

We are also both poets, and admired what Xitlalitl (Sisi) was doing with language and formal experimentation—interesting rhythms, multiple personas, humour, and aquatic landscapes and imagery. Sharks, Hollywood, teeth, climate change, translation, and labour are some of the topics that captivated us.

Dani first encountered the collection in 2018 on Poesía Mexa, a blog archive of contemporary Mexican poetry, which she shared with Dora after meeting in 2019. Six years later, we are so looking forward to these sharks reaching new waters.


—I’m struck by how varied the poems feel—by how the central, looming signifier of the shark is deployed in so many ways. I find allusions to climate destruction, ICE raids, and discriminatory politics; meditations on language and its limitations; and explorations of the human tendency to both anthropomorphize and subjugate animals. The speakers’ voices are wonderfully varied, too, moving from conversational language to lyrical, philosophical turns of phrase. Were there specific challenges involved in translating such a wide-ranging collection of poems?

It’s a testament to the power of Sisi’s collection that the shifting voice and personas work together so fluidly. But, yes, plenty of challenges! The challenges were mostly on the line-level—untranslatable words, concepts, wordplays, and figuring out how to make up for the poetic moments that get lost. And conversely, delighting in the poetic moments gained—where a slant rhyme became possible in the translation but not the original, for example.

Another significant challenge was that English plays a political role in the original collection, primarily concerning English skills and employability in the Mexican tourism sector. We knew this wouldn’t come through in the same way in the translation, but we tried to preserve a kind of tension with English and to defamiliarize it within the text, as in “English to Spanish to English Version of an Interview with Ai Hasegawa,” a poem made from a process of double translation.

It’s interesting you mention the allusions to ICE raids currently happening in the US. The translation of this book, written in 2015, is transformed by the current political context that shapes the reader’s understanding of the work. It makes visible the tensions between the three countries that make up North America, at different points in time and in a different way than the original does. Also, fuck ICE.


—Difficulties of communication seem central to these poems. In “Do Sharks Dream?”, for instance, the speaker muses: “Nature chose for us a communicating void.” This line reminds me of Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson’s description of the space between an original work and its translation:

“I think of it as a ditch, a ditch between two roads or countries. It’s always been interesting for me, the state of mind that the translator arrives at, where they have two languages simultaneously on their brain-screen. And they’re saying something not quite equivalent and they both keep on floating there.”

I’m curious whether this description resonates with you both, and if not, how you might describe the process otherwise.

Such a beautiful question. For us, there are two things to think about here: the act of translating, and the translations themselves. The process and the record. The ditch metaphor offers an image of liminality or edge space beyond the reach of either language; this image resonates with us, but the process itself lives outside language.

We love Don Mee Choi’s idea of translation as an anti-neocolonial mode—an activity of mapping, rather than tracing. When we sit down to translate, we’re wandering together, fueled by the excitement of transmitting a text that touched us both deeply, but ultimately arriving at an entirely new place. Like writing down dreams, translation is surreal and messy. Like many contemporary translators, we push against the idea of translation as a linear method of copying from one language to another. Yet the work is rooted in the original.

And when the original passes through our bodies, it is shaped by the processes of living that shape us: playfulness, responsibility, cultural knowledges and backgrounds, bilinguality, political imprints, love, and more. Similar to writing poetry, the magic of translating is in the impulse to transmit and create and connect.


—How did you approach the translation of JAWS as a duo? And how does translating with another person differ from translating individually, in your experience?

It’s dark out. Dora has a destination in mind, she travels by boat. She sees Dani in the distance, on another boat. A shark appears. Dani pulls out her pen and tries to draw it, Dora does the same. While drawing, the destination gets blurry, and each line charts a new course. They both examine each other's lines, delighted by the ways in which the two drawings differ. From these two drawings, they make a third drawing, trying to capture all of the beauty and mystery of the shark, but also trying to make the drawing its own art object. This third drawing becomes a new shark that swims off to a different ocean, encountering new creatures. Maybe some of those creatures will pull out their own pens. For now, Dora and Dani row back to shore and dream about other oceans and their mysteries.


—Not only are you both poets as well as translators, but you also co-founded El Mash Up, a bilingual, multidisciplinary arts collective based in Vancouver. In what ways does your translation work inform your other artistic work, and vice versa?

When you translate a poem, you get to a level of granularity with language—all its potential meanings, subtexts, connotations, problems—to a degree not present in the same way when writing a poem, where a word choice is often intuitive over precise. Translation challenges us to lean into that precision and constraint as playful parameters, to go back to a sentence over and over again. Learning to combine this impulse with intuition has been helpful when writing poems and engaging with our other artistic practices, which include film, photography, sound, and collage.

Also, translation is a lens that de-centres originality and gets us thinking more about how every text and work of art is in conversation with another, or many. We do not exist individually.
So what happens when we enter the ditch, from Carson’s quote, together? This is what we explore at El Mashup, which is all about inhabiting the in-betweenness of being Latin Canadian artists collectively.